I Am A Butterfly

There’s a guy on a message board I read. He has advanced prostate cancer, and is on his second or third bout with the disease. It just keeps coming back.

And this time, it’s not only come back, but it’s spreading, and it sounds very much like this guy is going to die. He has kids, including a new baby who was born a few weeks early. He started his current round of chemo and radiation while she was still in the NICU.

I don’t know this guy well at all, but it breaks my heart. My heart aches for his wife, and especially for his kids, who will miss out on so much with a loving father. It’s a tragedy. An honest to god tragedy. One that’s played out every single day all over the world.

Sometimes, I’m absolutely astounded that there is yet to be a cure for this disease. With everything that’s possible in our modern world, how can it be that cancer keeps on going?

Yes, I am aware of what yesterday was. No, I didn’t post anything about it. Why? Because I think this yearly ripping off of the scab is damaging to our national psyche. Not to mention, I don’t like what that horrible day has been made to symbolize by our government. And that’s all I have to say about that.

At my check in at the clinic today, I still had four follicles. Four. All pretty much the same size they were last week, maybe a millimeter or two smaller, which basically amounts to the same size. Since there were five last week, that means that one of them did go away, but that’s not good enough. This means, of course, more. Fucking. Lupron. It’s been nearly five weeks of Lupron already. If this doesn’t resolve by next week, this cycle will be cancelled.

Demon seems a bit better today. He still hasn’t pooped, but I caught him in the kitchen sink drinking from a bowl - and ignoring the two bowls of fresh water on the floor and the one bowl of fresh water on the island - so I turned on the bathroom sink faucet to let him drink from there. He did, and a nice long drink it was, indeed. He’s also a lot less needy and clingy than he’s been for the past few days, which is a good sign.

Something really disgusting I saw today: a really fat 6- or 7-year-old in a ride-on, battery powered Hummer. Not that the kid disgusted me, but seeing a very fat child in a $400 toy modeled on a gas-guzzling behemoth struck me as being perfectly representative of every single thing that’s wrong with Amercia, all rolled into one package.

The Lupron may have started kicking in with a vengeance yesterday - so far, my only recurring, regular side effect has been daily headaches - because yesterday afternoon found me sitting on the sofa with these hiccupping sobs emanating from my mouth and tears streaming down my face.

When I was little, I learned early the value of a good cry when it came to getting your way, and I learned that in order for it to work, you had to look pretty while doing it, because it had to look like you were horribly sad, not throwing a tanrtrum. So I would sit in front of a mirror and think of something really sad and practice crying prettily. I had the endearing little lip quiver; the wide, vulnerable brown eyes; the heartbreakingly delicate sniffles… all of it. I had it down cold. I used it on boyfriends into my 20’s when I was bitchier and more manipulative and a whole lot more insecure than I am now.

Yesterday’s cry was not one of those pretty cries. It was a full out, sobbing, sodden, drooly, blubbery, snotty mess of a cry. It was a cry that made the cats stare at me with a great deal of alarm in their face, and it was a cry that I didn’t know I had in me. I still think I really didn’t have it in me, and that it was an emotional meltdown brought on by the Lupron.

That’s not what this post is really about, though. This post is about the thing that snapped me out of the crying.
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I was reading this article at CNN this morning about the ongoing child sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic Church. Bishop Wilton D. Gregory, president of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, blamed part of the problem on “gay priests and a perceived proliferation of gay men in seminaries.”

Forgetting, for the moment, the ridiculous idea that homosexuals are more likely than heterosexuals to abuse children, it seems to me that the church encourages gay men to enter the priesthood. Since 1975, the church’s view of homosexuality is that homosexual orientation (feelings) were not wrong, because one’s orientation is not a matter of choice; it is something that one is born with. However, they stated that to act upon one’s feelings by engaging in a homosexual act is a sin, whether it be in a casual or committed relationship. In other words, you can be gay, you just can’t act on being gay. You should be celibate.

To someone religious enough to buy into that, it would seem that the priesthood is a perfect option. You can live a celibate life, while serving your god and having the companionship of your flock and brother priests. Seems like a great choice when the only other one is to live your life with no hope of ever finding a romantic soulmate, doesn’t it?

Chicago archbishop, Cardinal Francis George, said, “…an ordained priest is a married man. He’s a committed man, the bride of Christ.” Huh?? The bride of Christ?? This brings so many questions to mind that I barely know where to begin. Here are a few that are crowding to the forefront of my brain:

– If an ordained priest is married to Christ, a man, wouldn’t women and gay men make the best priests?
– Since nuns are also married to Christ, does that mean JC is bisexual?
– If JC is bisexual, why does the church frown on gay and lesbian marriages?

Laying aside the issue of Christ’s sexual orientation, let’s step back to the idea that homosexuals are more likely to sexually abuse children. Here I say again, huh? Researchers at the University of Colorado found that a child’s risk of being molested by a heterosexual may be more than 100 times greater than the risk of being abused by a homosexual. The founder of morons.org has been cataloging news stories about fundamentalists and confirmed heterosexuals in the news molesting kids versus Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, and Transgendered people molesting kids and his very informal findings show a much larger percentage of heterosexuals abusing children.

The problem with the Catholic church is not gay priests. The problem is the church’s unwillingness to deal with the bad apples in its own ranks at the times that those bad apples make themselves known. Any priest who preys on children should be defrocked and handed over to authorities. End of story. And end of my comments.